Session Information
32 SES 03 A, New Methods to Study and to Develop Organizations and Organizational Learning
Paper Session
Contribution
Research question, objectives and theoretical background
In an otherwise seminar-based educational program to develop the leadership in a Danish vocational academy, participating academy managers and university-based researchers took part in a supplementary process of reflexively writing ‘organizational dairies’ based on participants organizational experiences and perceived challenges in advancing the pedagogical practice of the vocational academy.
This paper aims to describe the collaborative reflexive dairy writing as a participatory action research method of inquiring into organizational life and advancing organizational learning. The suggested research method, and the participant trajectories of both practitioners and researchers in the collaborative writing, draws on the process and complexity theory perspective of organizational life as complex responsive processesof interaction (Stacey & Mowles, 2016) and the autoethnographic practice of narrative reflexive inquiry (Stacey, 2012) suggested by complexity theory informed organizational scholars (see also Mowles 2011).
The paper aims to exemplify and theorize the collaborative reflexive writing inquiry based on empirical case material, and draws on insights from the interpretive and ethnographic practice of writing as a method of inquiry (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005). Writing, most often presented as a method of inquiry performed by researchers (Ibid.), is elaborated into a practice of practitioners writing reflexively about their organizational experience and responding, in writing, to the reading of the organizational dairies of their management colleagues. Making the writing inquiry collaborative amongst educational managers in the vocational academy by asking the managers to respond reflexively to the organizational dairies of their colleagues holds a promise of organizational learning as an outcome of the collaborative writing inquiry. The paper seeks to bring out, as well as problematize, the organizational learning outcome of the collaborative writing inquiry.
University-based researchers collaborating with the academy managers in the shared research project on developing pedagogically-supportive leadership in the vocational academy, take part in the dairy writing process by responding reflexively from their own lived experience as both organizational members themselves and as scholars in organizational learning, education and management. The researcher participation in the suggested process of inquiry draws on process ontological approaches to research methodology (Shotter, 2015; Revsbæk, 2016; Fachin & Langley, 2017) calling for new ways of researchers to relate to those and that which is studied, developing knowledge from within the process of the evolving phenomena (Shotter, 2015) and allowing for researcher resonant experience (Revsbæk, 2018) to be part of the cross-organizational inquiry into the patterns of organizational life.
Method
Methods and methodology Dairy documents from the research project constitute the body of empirical material analysed in the paper. Project participant were organized in four ‘dairy teams’ of three to four academy managers and two responding university-based researchers. Participants in each of the ‘dairy teams’ took part in the process of collaborative reflexive writing during a period of four months from November 2018 to February 2019. The collaborative writing was rhythmed by first individual dairy writing of own lived organizational experience, then reading the dairy of colleagues and writing-in-response to the reading the dairy of a colleague only then to receive and read the responses given by colleagues and university-based researchers to their own reflexive dairy. The process of the writing inquiry was repeated in each of the dairy teams after a two-month period, creating a chronology in the process of inquiry allowing participants to pick up and respond to what they perceive as merits of the collaborative process of inquiry. In this paper, dairy documents are presented in a case description format, each case centering on a key content theme arising in the responsive dairy writing across participants’ texts. Key content themes are identified by coding the dairy document material based on principles of Giorgi and Giorgi’s (2003) phenomenological approach of identifying units of meaning. The evolution and patterning of the key content themes across the sequential and multi-actor dairy writing is portrayed in consideration of approaches to analysing qualitative process data (Jarzabkowski, Lê & Spee, 2017).
Expected Outcomes
The expected outcome is a presentation of the method of collaborative reflexive writing informed by the research methodology literature on writing as a method of inquiry. The paper presents reflections on how the collaborative reflexive writing serves as a method of organisational learning in participatory action research engaging both organisational management practitioners as well as university-based researchers.
References
Fachin, F. F., & Langley, A. (2017). Researching organizational concepts processually: The case of identity.The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods: History and Traditions, 308. Giorgi, A. & Giorgi, B. (2003). The descriptive phenomenological psychological method. In P. Camic, J. Rhodes & L. Yardley (Eds.), Qualitative research in psychology – Expanding perspectives in methodology and design, s. 275-297. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association Press. Jarzabkowski, P., Lê, J., & Spee, P. (2016). Taking a strong process approach to analyzing qualitative process data. In A. Langley & H. Tsoukas (Eds.),The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies, pp. 237-253. US, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (2017). Introduction: Process thinking, process theorizing and process researching.The SAGE Handbook of Process Organizational Studies, 1-25. US, Thousand Oaks: Sage. Mowles, C. (2011). Leaders, managers and consultants as researchers: Using the self as an instrument of research. In Mowles, C. (2011). Rethinking management: Radical insights from the complexity sciences. Gower Publishing, Ltd., kap. 3, side 59-88. Revsbæk, L. (2016). Making methodology a matter of process ontology. InOrganisation und Methode(pp. 51-59). Springer VS, Wiesbaden. Revsbæk, L. (2018). Resonant experience in emergent events of analysis.Qualitative Studies,1(1), 24. Richardson, L., & St Pierre, E. (2008). A method of inquiry. Denzin, N. K. (Ed.),Collecting and interpreting qualitative materials,3(4), 473. Shotter, J. (2015). On “relational things”: A new realm of inquiry—pre-understandings and performative understandings of people’s meanings. The emergence of novelty in organizations, 56-79. Stacey, R. (2012). Tools and techniques of leadership and management. Meeting the challenge of complexity, UK, Oxon: Routledge. Stacey, R., & Mowles, C. (2016). Strategic Management and Organisational Dynamics: The challenge of complexity to ways of thinking about organisations, 7th Ed. UK: Person Education Limited.
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